Key findings
- The Russian forest is still the largest in the world, but the romantic notion of the taiga as an unbroken band of boundless wilderness is a myth.
- Approximately a quarter (26 percent) of the Russian forest remains essentially undisturbed (intact). A total of 289 million hectares (714 million acres) remain in areas that have no signs of infrastructure or modern land use, and are at least 50,000 hectares (123,500 acres) in size (intact forest landscapes)
- Eastern Siberia is the most pristine of all regions, with 39 percent of the forest zone in intact forest landscapes. The Russian Far East has 30 percent, Western Siberia has 25 percent. European Russia is the least pristine with only 9 percent intact.
- Major threats to remaining intact forests include industrial forest harvesting and human-set fires in European Russia and in the southern parts of Siberia and the Russian Far East. Mineral development (and human-induced fires) threatens forest landscape integrity in other regions.
- Temperate broad-leafed and mixed conifer-broad-leafed forests are at particular risk. In general, across Russia, forests in the south have undergone the greatest degree of fragmentation and degradation.
- Approximately 5 percent of the intact forest landscapes have special protection at the federal level. Most administrative and ecological regions of Russia lack a system of protected areas inside the remaining intact forest landscapes that is sufficiently representative or large.
- Without decisive action within the next few years, intact forest landscapes may disappear within whole ecological regions and even vegetation zones.
